10 Best Things to Do in Rome, Italy — beyond the obvious
A long-term resident's guide to the city that refuses to be summarised
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Una guida di
Lena Hofmann
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29 aprile 2026
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The first time I came to Rome with any serious intention of understanding it, I spent three days doing exactly what you're not supposed to do. I queued for the Colosseum in August heat, ate a mediocre carbonara within sight of the Trevi Fountain, and photographed the Spanish Steps from an angle that ten million other people had already photographed. I was, in other words, processing Rome rather than experiencing it. The city permitted this. Rome is patient with tourists in the way that a large, old dog is patient with children — tolerant, slightly bored, occasionally capable of a slow bite.
What I've come to understand, after many subsequent visits and one extended stay that stretched from a planned three weeks into nearly four months, is that Rome doesn't reward itinerary-following. It rewards loitering. It rewards the wrong turn, the closed door that turns out to be open, the bar where nobody speaks English and the espresso costs ninety cents. The city is stratified in a way that no other European capital quite matches — you can be standing on a medieval street, above a Roman sewer, beside a Renaissance fountain, looking at a Baroque church facade, while a 2019 Fiat honks at a delivery scooter. The layers don't cancel each other out. They accumulate.
This list is not the Colosseum. It is not the Vatican Museums or the Sistine Chapel, which you should see, but which you will find described with more logistical precision elsewhere. What follows instead is a set of places that I've returned to more than once, that have surprised me, confused me, or simply given me somewhere to stand and think. A few of them are genuinely obscure. Most are not. But all of them are worth your time in a way that the queues outside them — where they exist — do not always suggest.
Most people walk through the Vatican's Cortile della Pigna without knowing that its enormous bronze pine cone — the one that gives the courtyard its name — is actually a Roman original, a fountain that once stood near the Pantheon or possibly the Temple of Isis, depending on which scholar you ask. But the Fontana della Pigna I want to direct you toward is the quieter, less photographed one: an elegant Renaissance composition in which two stylised tulip corollas stack atop a slender stem to support a pine cone, water threading from small channels at its base. It sits in its own small basin with the modesty of something that has no particular ambition to be noticed. In a city that frequently mistakes scale for significance, this restraint is its own kind of argument. The pine cone as a symbol predates Christianity in Rome — it appeared on fountains, tombs, and staff-heads — and finding one here, in this understated form, is a small lesson in how Rome recycles its own iconography across centuries without apparent effort or self-consciousness.
Il consiglio del team
The area around the fountain is considerably less trafficked in the early morning. Arrive before nine and you will have it largely to yourself, which is the correct way to look at anything small and precise.
Most visitors walk past the Fontana della Pigna without registering it as a destination in its own right, which is precisely why it rewards a deliberate stop. The fountain — a simple, elegant stem rising from a shallow basin, with two stylised tulip corollas supporting a bronze pine cone at its apex — sits in the courtyard of the Palazzo della Pigna, a few minutes' walk from the Pantheon. Water issues from two small channels in a way that feels almost apologetic, as if the fountain is aware it cannot compete with the baroque theatrics elsewhere in the city. The pine cone itself is a reproduction; the ancient original, a massive bronze artifact from the first or second century AD, spent centuries in the atrium of Old St. Peter's Basilica before being moved to the Vatican. This smaller, quieter version carries none of that prestige, which is perhaps why it feels more genuinely Roman — functional, a little worn, uninterested in impressing you.
Il consiglio del team
The courtyard is easy to miss because the entrance is narrow and unmarked on most maps. Come in the late morning before the lunch crowds thicken the surrounding streets.
Romans call it the typewriter, or the wedding cake, or — less charitably — the false teeth. The Altare della Patria, more formally the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II, is the kind of building that provokes strong opinions from people who have never been inside it. Built between 1885 and 1935 in a gleaming white Brescian marble that refuses to age into the ochres and terracottas of its surroundings, it has always looked like an uninvited guest at a dinner party. That is, in part, the point. It was designed to announce unified Italy with maximum volume, and it does. What most visitors miss is that the interior contains a serious collection of Risorgimento-era art and documents, and that the building's upper terraces — reachable by lift — offer one of the more honest panoramas in the city. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at its base is guarded around the clock, and the changing of the guard, conducted without fanfare and without a tourist audience in mind, is worth pausing for.
Il consiglio del team
The lift to the very top terrace costs a few euros and is worth every cent. The view north over the city is the one the architects intended, and it frames the Pantheon's dome against the Quirinal Hill in a way that no postcard has ever quite captured.
In Piazza della Minerva, directly behind the Pantheon, stands one of the more quietly comic monuments in a city not known for comic monuments. Piazza della Minerva ed il suo Pulcino — the little elephant obelisk that Romans have nicknamed 'il Pulcino,' the chick — was designed by Bernini in 1667. The elephant is small, almost toy-like, with an expression of mild bewilderment. It carries an Egyptian obelisk on its back, which Bernini apparently intended as a meditation on the relationship between strength and wisdom: the elephant bearing ancient knowledge on its spine. Romans, characteristically, decided it looked like a chick and called it that. The square itself is rarely quiet — the Pantheon is a hundred metres away, and the overflow crowds are constant — but the elephant has a way of stopping people mid-stride. Children touch its trunk. Adults photograph it from the wrong angle and then try again. It is, in its modest way, one of the most successful public sculptures in the city.
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The Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva is directly behind the elephant. The two are worth visiting in sequence — the contrast between the outdoor whimsy and the interior's severity is instructive.
Inaugurated in October 1970 to mark the centenary of the plebiscite that made Rome the capital of unified Italy, the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento occupies the left wing of the Vittoriano complex and is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most undervisited serious museums in the city. This is partly a problem of location — it shares an address with a monument that most tourists treat as a backdrop for photographs rather than a destination — and partly a problem of subject matter. The Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century movement for Italian unification, does not travel well as a narrative. Its heroes — Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour — require some prior investment. But the collection itself is arresting: uniforms, correspondence, weapons, paintings, and printed proclamations that together document one of Europe's more unlikely national projects. The museum is rarely crowded, the staff are not indifferent, and the silence inside is the kind that large, serious collections earn.
Il consiglio del team
Admission is often included with the Vittoriano complex ticket. Check at the main desk rather than assuming the signage, which is inconsistent.
Santa Maria sopra Minerva is one of the very few Gothic churches in Rome, which in a city of baroque excess makes it feel like a foreign correspondent. Built in the thirteenth century by Dominican friars on the site of an ancient temple to Minerva — hence the name — it has a blue vaulted ceiling painted with gold stars that takes a moment to register as real after the white marble facades of most Roman churches. The relics of Saint Catherine of Siena are kept here, and her tomb draws a steady stream of pilgrims who move through the side aisles with a purposefulness that the casual visitor would do well not to interrupt. Michelangelo's Cristo Portacroce stands near the high altar, a marble figure of Christ carrying the cross that the sculptor apparently found insufficiently finished and wanted to destroy. The church kept it anyway. There is a lesson in that, though I am not sure what it is.
Il consiglio del team
The church closes for a long midday break. Go either in the morning or after four in the afternoon. The light through the rose window is better in the late afternoon in any case.
The Campidoglio — Michelangelo's piazza, the two flanking museums, the equestrian Marcus Aurelius at its centre — is one of the great civic spaces in Europe, and it is crowded accordingly. But the terrace behind the Palazzo Senatorio, which looks directly down over the Roman Forum, is a different proposition. There are in fact three separate panoramic terraces here, two of which require no ticket and no queue, and from which you can see the Forum laid out below with a clarity that the Forum itself, once you're inside it, doesn't always provide. The third terrace, on the roof of the Palazzo Senatorio, adds height and a view toward the Palatine Hill. None of this is secret. But the terraces are used mainly by people who have already paid to enter the Capitoline Museums, which means that on a busy afternoon, the free terraces can be oddly quiet. The view down into the Forum at dusk, when the tour groups have thinned and the light is coming in low from the west, is the kind of thing you remember not as a sight but as a feeling.
Il consiglio del team
The terrace directly behind the Palazzo Senatorio is accessible from the piazza level without entering the museums. Walk around the left side of the building and follow the path up.
The Altare della Patria — more properly the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II, or, as Romans call it with varying degrees of affection, 'la Torta Nuziale' (the wedding cake) or 'la macchina da scrivere' (the typewriter) — is one of those buildings that has been so thoroughly mocked that people forget to look at it. Completed in 1935 after decades of construction, it displaced a significant portion of the medieval Capitoline Hill, which is a fact the Romans have not entirely forgiven. Up close, the white Brescian marble is almost aggressively bright, and the scale — which photographs flatten — is genuinely disorienting. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at its base is guarded around the clock, and the changing of the guard, which happens with military precision and no fanfare, is worth watching once. The building is not subtle. It was not designed to be subtle. But it is, on its own terms, a serious piece of architecture, and the view from the top terrace is one of the better ones in Rome.
Il consiglio del team
The elevator to the very top — the Quadriga terrace — costs a few euros and is worth it. Most tourists stop at the lower free terrace and miss the full panorama.
The Palazzo del Grillo sits in the piazza of the same name, a seventeenth-century building of considerable character — a main facade flanked by two projecting wings — that most visitors to Rome walk past without registering. Its fame, such as it is, rests partly on the 1981 Alberto Sordi film Il Marchese del Grillo, a comedy about an aristocratic eccentric who exploited his rank with cheerful shamelessness. The building itself is not generally open to the public, which is fine. The point is the piazza, which backs up against the side of Trajan's Markets and offers one of those accidental urban compositions — medieval masonry, Baroque architecture, and imperial-era brick all within a single sightline — that Rome produces without apparent effort. The neighbourhood around it, between the Monti rione and the Forum, is worth walking slowly. It has not yet been entirely remade for tourism, though the restaurants nearest the Forum have the pricing structure of places that know they don't need to try.
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The view from the piazza toward Trajan's Column, visible over the roofline to the northwest, is better at this angle than from the official viewpoint on Via dei Fori Imperiali.
Inside the left wing of the Vittoriano, accessed through a door that most visitors walk past without a second glance, is the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento. Inaugurated in 1970 to mark the centenary of the plebiscite that made Rome the capital of unified Italy, it is a museum that has the atmosphere of a place that has not been disturbed much since its opening. The collection covers the Risorgimento — the nineteenth-century movement for Italian unification — through documents, paintings, weapons, uniforms, and personal effects. It is not a flashy museum. The interpretive panels are dense and assume a degree of prior knowledge that most foreign visitors do not have. But that is also its appeal: it is a museum made for Italians, by Italians, about a subject Italians care about in complicated ways, and the lack of tourist-facing smoothness gives it an honesty that the more curated attractions nearby do not have.
Il consiglio del team
Entry is free, which means there is genuinely no reason not to go in. Allow at least an hour if you want to read the panels rather than just look at the display cases.
Rome is not a Gothic city. The climate, the available stone, the civic temperament — none of it inclined toward the vertical aspiration of northern European cathedrals. Which makes Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a few steps behind the Pantheon, genuinely unusual: it is one of the only Gothic churches in the city, built by Dominican friars in the late thirteenth century on the foundations of a temple to Minerva. The interior is a surprise after the Baroque overload of most Roman churches — ribbed vaulting, a nave that reaches upward rather than outward, Filippino Lippi frescoes in the Carafa Chapel that most visitors walk past too quickly. The church also holds the relics of Catherine of Siena, patron saint of Italy, whose body lies beneath the high altar while her head is kept in Siena. Michelangelo's Cristo della Minerva stands near the entrance, slightly awkward in its bronze drapery, which was added later by someone who found the original nudity inappropriate.
Il consiglio del team
The church is often less crowded than the Pantheon immediately in front of it, despite being free to enter. Go in the early afternoon when tour groups are at lunch.
Il Palazzo del Marchese del Grillo sits on a small piazza of the same name, a short walk from the Imperial Forums. The building dates to the seventeenth century — a facade flanked by two projecting wings, the whole thing slightly compressed into its urban setting as if it grew into the space rather than being planned for it. The palazzo is not open to the public in any formal sense, but the piazza in front of it is, and the building's exterior repays the kind of slow looking that Rome rewards. It is best known internationally for Alberto Sordi's 1981 film Il Marchese del Grillo, in which a dissolute Roman nobleman uses his palazzo as the stage for increasingly elaborate pranks on the lower classes. The film is a comedy, but it is also a fairly precise document of a certain Roman relationship to hierarchy and impunity. The piazza tends to be quiet in the mornings, which is rare in this part of the city.
Il consiglio del team
The view from the piazza toward the Imperial Forums and the Torre dei Conti is one of the better unremarked angles in the historic centre. Bring a camera with a wide lens.
The Palazzo del Quirinale has been the official residence of Italian heads of state since the country unified, and before that it served popes and French-appointed kings. It sits on the highest of Rome's seven hills, about half a kilometre from the Vittoriano, and it is open to the public on Sundays and on certain weekdays — a fact that a surprising number of visitors to Rome do not know. The state apartments contain frescoes by Guido Reni and Melozzo da Forlì, tapestries, and a sequence of rooms that document four centuries of Italian and papal taste in a way that the Vatican Museums, for all their scale, cannot quite replicate. The gardens, which are occasionally open, are formal and large and contain a fountain that has been running, in various configurations, since the sixteenth century. The changing of the guard at the main gate on Sunday mornings is conducted with a seriousness that suggests nobody has told the participants that this is now primarily a tourist spectacle.
Il consiglio del team
Book online in advance. Walk-up tickets are sometimes available but the booking system is not intuitive, and the English-language version of the website is occasionally out of date with opening hours.
The Roman Forum — Forum Romanum — is on every list, and I have included it here anyway, because the experience of it depends almost entirely on how you approach it, and most people approach it badly. They arrive mid-morning with a tour group, spend forty minutes following a guide who is audible only to the front three rows, and leave feeling they have seen it. They have not seen it. The Forum was the centre of Roman public life for roughly a thousand years: courts, temples, triumphal processions, markets, elections, funerals. What remains is fragmentary — the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Temple of Saturn's eight surviving columns, the Via Sacra worn smooth by two millennia of feet — but the fragments are enough if you give them time. Historians believe the Forum was already being used as a grazing field, the Campo Vaccino, by the medieval period. That arc from world centre to cow pasture to UNESCO site is Rome in miniature.
Il consiglio del team
Buy the combined ticket that includes the Palatine Hill and arrive at the Palatine entrance on Via Sacra rather than the main Forum entrance. The crowds are thinner, and the view down into the Forum from the hill is worth the longer walk.
Behind the Pantheon, in a piazza that most tourists cross without stopping, there is an Egyptian obelisk from the reign of Apries — sixth century BC — balanced on the back of a marble elephant. Romans call it il Pulcino, the chick, a diminutive that captures both the elephant's modest scale and the affection the city has developed for it over three and a half centuries. The design is attributed to Bernini, who was commissioned by Pope Alexander VII in 1667, and who apparently intended the composition as a statement about wisdom requiring a strong foundation. The inscription on the base says something to that effect in Latin. What it actually is, in practice, is one of the more charming pieces of public sculpture in a city that is not short of them — a small, slightly comic object that has survived wars, papal politics, and the tourist economy without losing its capacity to make people smile. The piazza around it is not large. It fills quickly in the morning with people who have just visited the Pantheon and are not yet sure where to go next.
Il consiglio del team
The elephant faces east, toward the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. For the better photograph, position yourself to the west in the early morning when the light is behind you.
Within the Forum, a few metres from the Curia — the ancient Senate building — there is a small, fenced depression in the ground that most visitors step around without registering. This is the Lacus Curtius, and it has one of the stranger histories of any site in Rome. It is an ancient sacred spot, marked by a small stone well, which the Romans believed was an entrance to the underworld. The legends attached to it are multiple and contradictory: one holds that a chasm opened here and an oracle declared it would only close when Rome threw its most precious possession into it, whereupon a soldier named Marcus Curtius rode his horse into the gap, and the earth closed over him. Whether the lacus was originally a marsh, a lightning strike site, or something else entirely, scholars still debate. What is not debated is that Romans left votive offerings here for centuries. The site is easy to miss, which is part of its character.
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There is a worn marble relief near the site depicting a horseman — thought to represent Curtius himself. It is small and at ground level. Most people photograph the Arch of Septimius Severus behind them and never look down.
The Roman Forum rewards the visitor who arrives with some prior reading and disappoints the one who arrives expecting the Colosseum. It is a field of ruins, largely unroofed, requiring imagination and a tolerance for heat in summer. Most people walk through it in an hour, photograph the three standing columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, and leave. The Lacus Curtius is rarely on anyone's itinerary. It is a small, fenced enclosure near the Curia — the Senate building — containing a low stone well and a worn marble relief of a horseman. Ancient Romans believed it marked the spot where, in the early Republic, a chasm opened in the earth and an oracle declared that it would only close when Rome threw its most precious possession into it. A soldier named Marcus Curtius, interpreting this to mean Rome's armed virtue, rode his horse into the void. The chasm closed. The well remained. Whether it was actually an entrance to the underworld is a matter the Romans themselves debated. What is not debatable is that the Forum, at this spot, feels genuinely old in a way that the more restored sections do not.
Il consiglio del team
The Forum is included in the combined Colosseum ticket, which must be booked in advance. Arriving at opening time — currently 9am, though this changes — means an hour in the Forum before the main crowds arrive from the Colosseum.
La terrazza del Campidoglio offers three separate panoramic terraces from the Capitoline Hill, and two of them are free, which in Rome in 2024 is a minor civic virtue. The hill itself — the Capitolium, the religious and political centre of ancient Rome — was redesigned by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century, and the piazza he created, with its oval pavement pattern and the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at its centre (a copy; the original is inside the Capitoline Museums), remains one of the more considered urban spaces in the city. The terraces behind the Palazzo Senatorio look out over the Forum, and the view is the kind that makes you understand, briefly and without sentimentality, why people have been writing about this city for two thousand years. The terrace to the front looks toward the Vittoriano and the city's roofline. Both are worth your time, at different hours.
Il consiglio del team
The terrace behind the Palazzo Senatorio is best at dusk, when the Forum stones take on a colour that is difficult to describe and impossible to photograph accurately. Go twice if you can: once in the morning for the light, once in the evening for the mood.
The Roman Forum — Forum Romanum in Latin — was for several centuries the centre of Roman public life: elections, criminal trials, gladiatorial contests before the Colosseum was built, commercial transactions, religious ceremonies. Historians believe it began as a marketplace in the seventh century BC and continued in active use well into the late imperial period. By the medieval era it had become a cow pasture, known as the Campo Vaccino, and its marble was systematically quarried for building material across the city. What remains is partial, but the partiality is itself instructive. The Arch of Septimius Severus still stands to nearly its original height. The Temple of Saturn retains eight columns. The Via Sacra, the processional road, is still walkable. The Forum is not a spectacle. It is a document, and like most documents it gives more on the second reading than the first. The first visit is for orientation. The second, ideally on a quieter morning, is when you start to understand what you're looking at.
Il consiglio del team
The Palatine Hill, included in the same ticket, is significantly less crowded than the Forum below it and offers shade, garden terraces, and views down into the Forum that clarify the spatial relationships between buildings.
The Palazzo del Quirinale sits on the highest of Rome's seven hills and has served as the official residence of the President of the Italian Republic since 1948, before which it was home to popes and, briefly, to Italian kings. The building is not small — it has been expanded and modified over four centuries, and the complex includes gardens that cover several hectares. What most visitors do not know is that the palazzo opens to the public on certain days, including Sunday mornings during specific periods, and that the interior — frescoes, tapestries, state rooms of considerable scale — is accessible without the kind of queuing that the Vatican demands. The gardens are a particular draw: formal in their structure but with a lived-in quality that the more famous Villa Borghese gardens, further north, do not always achieve. The Quirinal Hill also offers views across Rome that are less photographed than the Janiculum or the Pincio.
Il consiglio del team
Check the official Quirinale website for opening dates and book in advance — entry is free but ticketed, and availability goes quickly. The Sunday morning openings in autumn tend to be the least crowded.
There is a version of Rome that exists entirely for visitors, and it is not without its pleasures. The gelato is frequently good. The light in October is the colour of old varnish. The fountains run cold water in summer and nobody has yet thought to charge for it. But the city that stays with you — the one you find yourself describing to people who haven't been, with a specificity that surprises even you — is the one built from smaller encounters. A pine cone fountain that nobody photographs. A Gothic nave in a city of Baroque ceilings. A stone well in a field of ruins where Romans once believed the earth had opened to receive a man on horseback.
Rome is not a city that can be done. This is its central fact and its central frustration. Every visit ends with a list of things you didn't get to, a neighbourhood you walked through too quickly, a church that was closed for restoration. The city is always partly inaccessible, always partly under scaffolding, always partly in the process of becoming something slightly different from what it was last time. This is not a flaw. It is the condition that makes return visits feel less like repetition and more like continuing a conversation that you began, without quite realising it, the first time you stood in front of something very old and felt the particular vertigo of understanding, briefly, how short your own time is.
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April, May, and October offer the most manageable combination of weather and crowd levels. August is when Romans leave and tourists arrive in their place — the city is hot, some neighbourhood restaurants close for the month, and the major sites are at peak congestion. November and February are cold and occasionally rainy but the Forum and Palatine Hill are nearly empty, which has its own appeal. Avoid the week between Christmas and New Year if you dislike crowds; the city is beautiful but extremely busy.
Do I need to book tickets in advance for the main sites?
For the Colosseum and Roman Forum combined ticket, advance booking is effectively mandatory in spring and summer — the same-day queue is long and the timed-entry slots sell out. The Capitoline Museums can usually be booked a day or two ahead. The Palazzo del Quirinale requires advance booking through its official website. The Vatican Museums should be booked weeks in advance between March and October. Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the Vittoriano terraces, and the Campidoglio terraces require no booking.
Is Rome walkable, or do I need public transport?
The historic centre is compact enough that most of the destinations in this article are within a kilometre of each other and easily walkable. The terrain is flatter than the city's reputation for seven hills suggests, at least in the central area. The metro is useful for reaching Trastevere, the Vatican, and the Borghese Gallery, but the two main lines do not cover the historic centre well. Buses are reliable but slow in traffic. Walking is almost always the better choice within the centre, and the street-level detail rewards it.
Are there common tourist scams I should know about?
Yes. Around the Colosseum and Trevi Fountain, men in centurion costumes will pose for photographs and then demand payment — sometimes aggressively. Near the major piazzas, unofficial 'guides' will attach themselves to you and expect a fee. Restaurants immediately adjacent to tourist sites frequently charge significantly more than those two streets away, and some add cover charges that are not clearly disclosed. The simplest rule: if someone approaches you in a tourist area offering something unsolicited, the transaction will not be in your favour.
What should I know about dress codes for churches?
Shoulders and knees must be covered to enter any Roman church, including Santa Maria sopra Minerva. This is enforced with varying degrees of consistency — some churches turn people away, others sell paper shawls at the door, others have given up entirely. The safest approach is to carry a light scarf or a layer that covers your shoulders, which doubles as useful clothing in the variable temperatures of spring and autumn. The Vatican enforces its dress code more strictly than most individual churches.
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